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The end of Pearsonian diplomacy: Gwyn

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's policy has been to support Israel unreservedly rather than, as with past administrations, to support that country while also taking account of the grievances and needs of Palestinians.
(ARIEL SCHALIT / AP)

Twice in the last few months, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has struck out with foreign policy programs that were entirely of his own making.

One was the statements Harper made during his visit to Israel. There our policy has become to support Israel unreservedly rather than, as in the past, to support that country while also taking account of the grievances and needs of Palestinians.

The other was to treat Iran with unqualified suspicion even though our allies, led by the U.S., are now negotiating with that country to try to secure a nuclear weapons pact.

Many Canadian commentators have expressed deep disappointment for the way Harper, in at least these two instances, is rewriting Canada’s long-established and widely praised policy of listening to both sides in international disputes and of trying to persuade others to adopt our own precepts of accommodation and compromise.

No matter the specific rights and wrongs of these new policies there is no question but that they constitute a radical departure from our so-called “Pearsonian diplomacy” developed in the 1940s and largely the creation of Lester Pearson, at first a senior diplomat and later himself a prime minister.

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While shocking to many Canadians, Harper’s initiatives are in one important respect in no way unique to him or to present-day Canada.

Today, a great many countries have taken on what could be called international unilateralism. In essence, more and more countries are going their own way in foreign policy decisions. Broad causes, such as human rights, have fallen out of favour.

The best description of the new international order is contained in the recent book Every Nation For Itself, by the political-risks consultant Ian Bremmer.

According to Bremmer, “For the first time in seven decades,” (back to the 1940s, that is), “we live in a world without global leadership.”

The U.S., which has led the world since the end of the Second World War, is now in decline, if not militarily yet, then politically, psychologically, diplomatically, financially.

Even militarily, the U.S. is no longer the power that it was. The reason is that Americans themselves have lost much of their faith in that power. According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, 52 per cent of Americans now believe they should, “let other countries get along the best they can in their own way.”

Around the world, many will applaud that view. The problem is, no substitute for American leadership exists, or, as Bremmer puts it, “no durable alliance of countries” is available to stay the course alongside the U.S.

The old G-8 (of which Canada is a member) is now little more than a club of rich nations, long overdue to be closed down. The new G-20 better represents the world as it now is, but it has too many members ever to make decisions, let alone to implement them.

To magnify the disorder, the European Union, once a source of stability and of idealism, has lost confidence in itself and now largely looks on international affairs from the sidelines.

Bremmer’s nice phrase for the new order is “G-Zero,” or everybody either doing what they want, or doing nothing. Absent some new system of global leadership when facing challenges of the order of terrorism and climate change and cyber-attacks, Bremmer reckons we face “catastrophe.”

Bremmer does sketch out one optimistic scenario. Or one that’s sort of optimistic. It’s that the U.S. and China may replace the old American monopoly by a duopoly.

Given China’s attitudes about human rights and democracy, that scarcely sounds optimistic. However, Bremmer believes that in this replay of the Cold War, with China replacing the Soviet Union as the U.S.’s rival, “the weapons of war will probably be economic.”

The coming contest, that is, will be not about swords but about plowshares, or, in today’s parlance, about smart phones and robots.

About all that’s certain is that the international past is now the past.

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